Bound to My Step-brother

Chapter Twelve

Ryker's POV

We were on a picnic scarf spread over grass so green it didn't look real, the kind of green that only exists in places untouched by anything ugly. I could feel the wool of the scarf under my palm, rough and soft, and beside me, Lila lay with her fingers laced through mine, her head tipped back to watch the glowing stars popping out of the dark blue sky.

Birds moved through the trees around us, twittering in a lazy, contented rhythm that matched the slow, easy beat of my own heart. A small bonfire crackled a few feet away.

“This is nice,” Lila said, her voice soft, and unhurried. "We should do this more."

"We should do this always," I said, and meant it more.

The moon rose full above the treeline, silver light spilling down over both of us until her skin glowed with it. She turned to look at me, and her eyes, steady, unafraid, undid the pain in my chest.

I kissed her. Slow, unhurried, the kind of kiss that didn't need to prove anything or rush toward anything else, just two people who'd finally stopped fighting for a single, uncomplicated moment to simply exist together.

This was what I've been fighting for. This, right here, was worth everything it's cost.

That was when the sky went dark. Completely dark.

Not clouds, wings. Enormous, leathery, blotted out the moon. Wind slammed down around us hard enough to flatten the fire and scatter the birds screaming into the trees. I looked up in time to see scales the colour of old rust catching what little light remained. Talons wide enough to swallow a car, closed around Lila before I could even get my body moving.

"Ryker!" Her scream tore through the air.

I lunged. My hand closed around nothing but empty air.

The dragon rose, wings beating down another brutal gust that knocked me flat onto the scarf, and I watched her disappear into a sky gone entirely black, her voice still echoing my name long after the shape of her had vanished completely.

"LILA!"

My own scream tore me awake.

I came back to myself gasping, drenched in sweat, my chest heaving like I'd actually been running instead of lying flat on my back. The ceiling above me was familiar , my own room, not a dream-forest, not a scarf, not a dragon-blackened sky- and it took several disorienting seconds for the panic in my chest to catch up with the fact that none of it had been real.

"Hey. Hey, you're okay." Kai's voice was, close, his hand pressing gently against my shoulder to keep me from bolting upright too fast. "You're safe. It was a dream."

Nadia and Talia were there too, both leaning in from the other side of the bed. Relief and worry etched tight across their faces.

I coughed, my whole body protesting the movement. Weakness dragged at every limb like I'd been drained from the inside out. But underneath the exhaustion, underneath the lingering horror of watching Lila vanish into a black sky, there was still that same steady thread I'd been clinging to for days.

"She's alive." My voice was raw. "I can still feel her."

"Where is she?" Talia asked immediately, leaning closer. "You can feel her where?"

I closed my eyes, reaching for the bond the way I'd learned to over the last agonizing week, searching for direction, for distance, for anything solid to hold onto.

"Far," I said finally, frustration cracking my voice. "She's not near. I can't tell where. It's like trying to hear someone shouting from the other end of a canyon. I know she's there. I can't make out the words."

"That tracks," Kai said quietly. "You've been out a week, man. A full week. If they moved her anywhere in that time, the distance alone could be doing this."

A week. The number hit me like a physical blow. I’d lost seven days entirely, feverish and half-conscious, while Lila had been somewhere out there enduring God knew what, and I hadn't been able to do a single thing to help her.

"We're here," Nadia said, her voice steady in a way that helped more than I expected it to. "All three of us. We're not going anywhere, and we're not waiting around either, the second you're strong enough, we start acting on every piece of information we have. Talia already has a list of people to talk to. I've been tracking everything Draven's said and done since the Tribunal."

"Draven," I repeated, and intense cold slid through the exhaustion, sharpening my focus despite how badly my body wanted to shut down again. I recalled the declaration of our love before the elders was all Draven's idea. Lila wouldn't have been kidn*pped if we hadn't appear before them.

Aside from wanting to put my family to shame, Draven had other ulterior motives. If this poison wasn't weakening me, I'd have compelled Draven to explain the desperate look he wore that day.

My father was never in support of this. He'd rejected the idea of bringing her home the undead attacked her with fire. "My father knows something. He has to. He's been too calm through all of this, too. And Draven he’s not clean." I coughed again, harder this time, my whole chest convulsing with the force of it.

"Ryker?" Talia's voice sharpened with alarm.

I tried to answer her. I opened my mouth, and instead of words, blood came out instead, dark, spattering the sheets in a way that sent all three of them lurching upright at once. Kai was already shouting for help, Nadia grabbed a cloth and Talia's hands hovered nervously over me because she didn't know where it was safe to touch.

The room tilted, the edges of my vision closed, fast and merciless, and the last thing I registered before the darkness swallowed me whole was the panicked sound of my own name being shouted, over and over, by three people who couldn't reach me fast enough to stop whatever was happening inside my own body.

My body trembled beyond my control. The strength to open my eyes faded.

I collapsed.